A few years ago I gave a community education presentation on American politics. The audience was (mostly) adults who already had degrees and who just had an interest in the topic. In the course of discussion, one participant who identified as “very conservative” asked how it was possible that Bernie Sanders had made the splash he did. She couldn’t understand how the term “socialism” wasn’t an automatic disqualifier.

I responded that many people believe the appeal has a lot to do with the unaffordability of many of the basics of middle-class life for young people. But there was also something else even more basic. I put a subtraction problem on the board: 2020 minus 1990 equals 30. Taking those as years, it meant that (at that point) nobody under about 35 had any living memory of the Cold War. It ended before they were born, or before they had any sense of the world beyond their family. Without exposure to the anticommunist propaganda in which many of us had been steeped, they didn’t develop the knee-jerk rejection response to the label “socialist” that older generations had.

From the look on her face, I could see that she hadn’t heard that one before. It’s obvious once you hear it, but until you connect the dots, it’s obscure.

I love explanations like those. To my mind, they’re what education should be about. What are the long-term trends or structural factors underlying the stream of events? What are the patterns, and what drives them? Longtime readers know my affinity for using Baumol’s cost disease as an explanation for chronically squeezed education budgets. It’s one of those basic mathematical facts that explains a lot once you see it, but is easy to miss in the day-to-day. Being aware of it offers an immune response to more superficial and/or ideologically driven explanations. (No, it’s not about lazy rivers or climbing walls. It never was.)

Last week brought an article that offers a similar bracing clarity. It helps explain the paradox that “nicer,” more affluent areas often have lower property tax rates than lower-income places. The short version is that tax-phobic municipal legislators jumped quickly into the bond market in the middle of the 20th century, and that the credit ratings on various bonds largely reflected the demographics (i.e., race and income) of the people who lived there.

Whiter and more affluent areas were able to borrow at lower interest rates than lower-income places and/or places with lower percentages of white people. When it came time to pay back those loans—bonds are a mechanism for loans—low-income cities had to pay much more than tonier suburbs did to service similar levels of debt. Over time, higher debt service costs led to both more borrowing and higher taxes, thereby driving away people with options. The loss of people with resources to the suburbs reduced the tax base for cities, forcing them to raise taxes even more, let services decay, or both. What started as a relatively nerdy and obscure point about the bond market became manifest in struggling cities a few decades later.

Sometimes the first domino in the chain seems almost silly. The chicken tax of 1964 is a classic case: In response to European tariffs on American chicken, the U.S. retaliated by putting tariffs on light trucks. Over time, that incentivized American car companies to focus more on light trucks than on cars, since they didn’t have to compete as hard with foreign manufacturers. To make matters worse, in the wake of the first energy crisis in the 1970s, the U.S. passed CAFE standards for gas mileage that applied different standards to different genres of vehicles. Instead of a straightforward gasoline tax, which would have rewarded efficiency across the board, it passed a law cracking down on small cars while giving light trucks—such as pickups and SUVs—much more leeway. The combination of relative protectionism and easier mileage standards for light trucks pushed automakers towards light trucks. We’re living with that now.

(We took a trip to Ireland last year to visit The Girl while she studied there. I couldn’t help but notice the almost complete absence of SUVs and pickups on the roads there. Consumer preference can explain only so much.)

Analyses like these can seem disempowering at first, but I find them energizing. If effects that just seem natural and inevitable are, in fact, artifacts of legible choices, then they can be changed. That suggests that the way things are isn’t the way they have to be.

For example, one lesson of the chicken tax is that we should not be cavalier about imposing tariffs; the ripple effects can be damaging in surprising ways. If our mechanisms for supporting cities lead to death spirals, we can change the mechanisms. If, say, housing is too expensive, we should be able to find ways around that, too. We just have to get the causes right.

Yes, community colleges offer job training, and rightly so. But they also offer courses with a longer historical view, and I say, good. If anybody needs the long view, it’s our students. The original meaning of “liberal arts” was the “arts of liberty,” or the skills that self-governing people would need. Those have never been more relevant, or necessary, than they are now.